


Revenant

by damalur



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Wish Fulfillment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-17
Updated: 2016-02-17
Packaged: 2018-05-21 07:45:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6043756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damalur/pseuds/damalur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Who builds the First Order?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Revenant

She watched from afar as Grand Admiral Thrawn’s campaign against the fledgling Republic blossomed and then withered; and finally she came to the conclusion that if she wanted the Empire to rise again, she was going to have to see to it herself.

In those days she was interested in neither power nor recognition, although in later years she came to appreciate command both for its own sake and for the ease with which it allowed her to accomplish her goals. Her devotion was to order and the shape that order took in the form of the Empire reborn, and she did whatever was necessary and expedient in the service of her cause. She whispered in a thousand ears, offered a thousand bribes, delivered a thousand threats; she took one man’s life and spared another’s; she brokered treaties between the stronger sectors of the Imperial Remnant and the weaker; and she made for that Remnant a safe-haven beyond the Republic’s ever-lengthening reach.

The Concordance was a military action that bought her time, nothing more, and she used that time to construct a following, a fleet, and a nation. To the signing of the cease-fire she sent in her place a Dark Side mystic and admirer of the late Emperor Palpatine’s; that the new Order was not led by a man named Snoke remained a closely-guarded secret revealed only to those in the highest ranks of the military. She had little patience for Snoke’s esoteric theorizing but much appreciation for the practical application of his gifts, and she recognized that in the world she was building there was a place for even this piece of Palpatine’s legacy.

And it started to eat at her, too: as a girl she had adhered neither to the Dark nor the Light, but at Endor her life had started a slow, inward fall into shadows, like a star caught in the gravitational tide of a black hole. Her new Empire was built not on the will of one man but on the faith of many, and for that reason it would endure; but a dragon was nothing without a head. On the day she revealed herself, it was with Vader’s heir at her right hand and the architect of the Republic’s death at her left that she ascended to her throne.

She styled herself Empress Mara I, the first of her line, and there were none who could stand against her.


End file.
